Author Archives: Phil

To Sale Or Not To Sale

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A recent Facebook application launched from Buy.com called Garage Sale. I think it’s self-explanatory — sell your stuff to your friends on Facebook. Theory is that they know and trust you, so it’s like a “garage sale” at your house.

TechCrunch thinks this type of closed system of selling won’t work because in this scenario, sellers don’t have access to a large customer base (like on eBay), or for that matter like on edgeio.com (the TechCrunch-backed classifieds site).

I thought about this for a while especially considering our success with classifieds in the eNeighbors neighborhood sites. For instance, if eNeighbors grew to the point of millions of users, how effective would our inter-community classifieds be? Would we be able to truly replace the newspaper classifieds? Or would someone like eBay ultimately win out?

The offline print classifieds are still successful to this day due to their ability to give you the “local” view of what people are selling. All you have to do is drive over and get it. Additionally, I know that some people (like my mother) love to go hunt for hidden treasures at garage/estate sales. Putting this experience online just wouldn’t translate.

In the end, I think the answer will be whatever website your average “non-techie” internet user knows about will be the one he/she uses. Additionally, that website needs to be easy to use and not intimidating to newbies. We are doing everything we can to make eNeighbors.com be exactly that.

Does Local Search Equal A Trillion Dollars?

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How many times have you gone to Best Buy to buy a new camera/TV/computer/printer and were carrying a bunch of printouts of product reviews you got from researching online first?

More and more of us are now researching purchases “online” and then buying “offline” in our respective local communities. In fact, Yahoo just released a study that confirms this behavior, and even more specifically outlines how online advertising affects offline purchase behavior.

Greg Sterling, interestingly enough, calls this behavior “Local Search” by way of his definition:

“Local search is a process where users conduct research online but with the ultimate intention or result being an offline transaction. It’s about the Internet influencing real-world buying decisions.”

In my mind, this means that “local search” really means “local buying” due to the fact that these two actions are merely steps in the traditional commerce process. In other words, you aren’t going to search for a service or product outside of your geographical vicinity if you intend to buy it offline.

Here’s the other part of Greg’s post that got my attention:

The phrase, The Trillion Dollar Marketplace, comes from recent Jupiter and Forrester e-commerce/retail reports that predict the Internet will be influencing a trillion dollars of offline (local) spending by either 2010 or 2011.

Personally, I think this estimate is a bit overly optimistic (1999 flashback, anyone?), but the point is that we spend most of our buying dollars in the physical community in which we live. You can’t buy food out of state and have it shipped (I guess you could, but it wouldn’t be hot). Most of us still like to try our clothes on before purchasing, and there’s no denying the joy of instant gratification (or less hassle of returns) of picking up that shiny new gadget toy from your local electronics store today (rather than in 7-10 business days). And if I want any type of service or repair for my house or car, guess what, it’s going to be local.

More and more, it’s becoming important for online buying guides to provide very relevant and very accurate local retail guides. Innovations like alerts to local sales and special offers or service referrals from your in-town friends and family are going to become imperative for the bricks and mortar lot to compete for those dollars that are not spent in the online channel.

Will Newspapers Survive?

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There’s an excellent article in this month’s Wired by Jeff Howe about the impact the internet is having on the newspaper industry. The story centers around Gannett and their efforts to thwart the decline that the entire news world is experiencing.

Having worked for the Kansas City Star at one point in my career, I can personally vouch for the ingrained behavior of the news publication process. The internet is definitely a disruptive technology, and this article paints a very insightful picture on what the news companies must face to continue to operate in the overly saturated information age.

Towards the middle of the article, some of the details of Gannet’s new approach are presented:

At the heart of the plan lie two Big Ideas that are sweeping through journalism circles nationwide: Involve the reader in every aspect of the process, and take a so-called hyperlocal approach to news coverage. In recent years, Gannett’s Cincinnati arm has gone from producing one metropolitan newspaper to producing 270 niche publications, including suburban papers, neighborhood Web sites, and regional magazines. The readers — their thoughts, their half-baked opinions, their kids’ Little League scores — are at the center of them all.

This is the exact same result we have seen with the eNeighbors service. People really do want to know about the stuff that’s just down the street. Yes, it doesn’t matter to anyone else (so there’s no profit in it for the newspapers), but the internet now allows us to focus on a much smaller demographic and still remain cost-effective.

The voice of the masses is definitely getting heard these days. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues or if we will eventually tire of the barrage of average talent and ultimately rely on the professionals for the information that matters most.

Why Build-It-Yourself Websites Suck

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Let’s say you are on the board of directors for your HOA. You’ve been put in charge of the landscaping and groundskeeping for the neighborhood. Naturally, you need to hire a landscape company. Most landscape companies provide the following:

1. Seeding, fertilizing and cutting of grass
2. Planting and care for flowers, shrubs, and trees

Why do you pay a landscape company for these services? They have the right equipment and the expertise to do the job, right? Also, to do all this work takes a lot of time. I’m not just talking about the time it takes to plant a tree, but the ongoing maintenance of watering and caring for any growing, living thing. Oh yeah, and the grass has to be cut about every 4-7 days.

Let’s not forget, you are a volunteer.

Since you have a day job, you would never attempt to do all this work yourself. There’s simply no time to do it, and you aren’t getting paid for it.

You call the landscape company and they tell you that they have a revolutionary new process for taking care of all your needs — you do it yourself.

Stay with me here… let’s say the landscape company then offered to give you a manual and training guides on how to take care of all your own landscaping, AND they want to charge you for it too.

That’s when you hang up on them.

So, why in the world would you accept this type of service for your neighborhood website?

Are you going to pay some company for a website and then do all the work of setting it up yourself? On top of that, you will have to update the site constantly by yourself. I don’t care if the fee is $2.00 a month, you’re still paying “them” and doing all the work on your own.

When we created the eNeighbors web application, this volunteer situation and constant maintenance issue was the central focus of our application development. We do all the work for you (that’s why we get paid). We set up the site for you, we make sure the site stays up, and here’s the best part — the entire community updates the site.

The board is no longer the continual bottleneck for new, fresh, and relevant information in your neighborhood. Every resident in your community has the ability to share news information, host a social event or post a classified ad.

Stop doing all the work yourself, and sign your neighborhood up with eNeighbors today.

National Neighborhood Day

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Do you love your neighborhood? Are you the one that always hosts the block party? Do your neighbors constantly help each other out?

Show how much you appreciate your community by celebrating on National Neighborhood Day, September 16, 2007.

The mission of National Neighborhood Day is to inspire, build, and sustain the neighborhood relationships that provide the foundation for civic action and the building of stronger, more caring and effective communities.

Also, be sure to check out the short film contest winners from 2006. The three films are very different from each other, and they give a great insight to the wide spectrum of community that exists across our country. The comments from the contest judges reflect this as well.

Visit the National Neighborhood Day website for more info.

Expanding To New Markets

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eNeighbors is looking to expand our sales efforts on some specific local markets across the country. We are currently considering the following cities:

Chicago
Phoenix
Orlando
Philadelphia
Dallas/Fort Worth

I’d like to ask our readers opinion and hear if they have any insight into these markets and whether or not the homes association market would be primed in these areas for eNeighbors to make some significant headway on getting communities online.

Additionally, if anyone has some other suggestions for where we might have success, I would love to hear what you all have to say.

Thanks.

Local Content: Year 2017

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There’s an interesting article from Online Journalism Review about how newspapers need to adapt to survive in the new web-centric news world.

How important is community-based media? Are the days of reading the paper over coffee and toast coming to an end with the aging of my parents’ generation?

Fast-forward ten years… picture this:

My seven year-old son is now seventeen. For breakfast, he pours a bowl of Lucky Charms and flips through his iPhone IMs, checks the weather and browses the programming schedule for the latest episodes in his friend’s local reality show (which is about to be picked up by MySpace Productions).

Next he checks to see which classes are “video-broadcast only” today so he can plan his Xbox gaming time accordingly. He also sees that the high-school football game tonight starts at 7pm, and the opposing team’s record is 6 and 2.

As he walks out the door, he calls back to me, “Dad, I just got a text from eNeighbors that the city council approved the proposal to build the Starbucks on that corner lot. Looks like your coffee addiction is going to be even harder to kick — ha, ha… see ya later.”

So I ask, what does true local content integration look like? It’s not about technology. Web-publishing has been around for over a decade. It’s about the right tools for the right people. And it’s about the right people believing in something bigger. Something new and not based on “what we’ve always done” in the past.

What will the true voice of local content sound/look/feel like?

eNeighbors Stats: 6/18 – 7/17

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We keep growing. As I mentioned on Monday, the classifieds feature is showing more and more popularity.

Traffic data:

82,662 page views – 18% increase (over last 30 days)
8,779 visits – 17% increase (over last 30 days)
5 minutes avg visit duration – 0% increase (over last 30 days)

18 neighborhoods online
2,115 registered users at 1999 unique addresses. All of these homes are in the Kansas City area except for one neighborhood in Fort Worth, TX and one in Napa, CA.

With 6,844 potential addresses in the neighborhoods that have signed up so far, we are at 29% adoption rate for our entire resident base.

The newsletter adoption rate is holding true as well with only 16 residents (out of 2,115) opting out of receiving the email newsletter.

That means 2,099 home owners are getting a weekly newsletter from eNeighbors that summarizes the activity in their neighborhood… sit back and think about that for a second.

Total user-generated content since launch (about 4 months):

News posts: 289
Events: 155
Groups: 54
Classifieds: 328

Help us continue to grow. Tell your friends about eNeighbors. And get your neighborhood signed up too.

The Future of Online Classifieds

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Kevin Kelleher wrote an interesting piece last week about eBay’s new Kijiji classifieds service in the U.S. and how it stacks up against Craigslist.

Kevin links to Internet Outsider which has this great comment:

Despite significant online classified efforts, moreover, the classified opportunity remains massive: The dying newspaper industry still rakes in tens of billions of dollars a year for printed classifieds — a less efficient, less informative, less convenient, more wasteful, and more expensive way to buy or sell products. In another few decades, when the current (and last) generation of hard-copy newspaper readers dies out, printed classifieds will seem as archaic as whale oil. The newspaper companies may be able to retain some classifieds business as it moves online, but given the success of Craigslist, Monster, et al (and the seriously weak newspaper efforts thus far), this percentage will likely be small.

So, there’s a $10 billion plus market for classifieds, and the majority of it is not online.

Here’s where I get excited. Of all the news and community content features that eNeighbors offers to the neighborhood residents, classifieds have been the most popular by far. To date (we launched in April), we have had over 300 classifieds posted from only 2000 users in 18 neighborhoods. Keep in mind that most of the neighborhoods have only been using our service for a few weeks.

Additionally, we have already received numerous comments from users that they would like to be able to publish their classifieds to other neighborhoods in their area. This is a site enhancement that we are currently working.

The great thing is that we built the classifieds engine as a “nice to have” feature for residents to use when garage sales were not appropriate never expecting it to be so popular, but our users have begun to see a huge potential for a truly hyper-local type of market square.

I’d like to see eNeighbors follow in Craig Newmark’s footsteps and provide valuable relevant classifieds in an even more hyper-local context.

Never underestimate the power of free.

Goodbye Backfence

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So, you might have heard — Backfence.com is shutting its doors. As expected, the industry insiders (Greg Sterling, Peter Krasilovsky, etc.) have commented most eloquently. However, Perry Evans has posted my favorite analysis of the dilemma that was the ultimate demise of Backfence. He gives the best “when the rubber meets the road” commentary on why hyper-local may or may not work.

In reference to whether or not hyper-local destination sites can be created and survive, Evans states the following:

“I am constantly pleased by the insight I read from newspaper new media executives. Nothing I am saying hasn’t been said, debated and documented in the newspaper industry. Having said that, the gap between understanding and execution is one perplexing motherload of a gap.”

Additionally, American Journalism Review (AJR) takes quite a long look at the Backfence situation. Here’s my favorite part:

“What we’re struggling with, and every major paper is struggling with, is how to reach our audience on a granular level, in a way we’ve never reached them before.” — Jonathan Krim, WPNI.

So, nobody has figured out hyper-local yet. Everybody says it’s doomed and can’t be done. yet more and more companies keep trying. I love that the AJR article recognizes the Lawrence Journal-World as one of the few innovators that have been successful. The LJW was my news source for many a year when I was in school at Kansas University. The town of Lawrence is truly a remarkable anomaly in the middle of nowhere midwestern U.S.A.

Well folks, those of us here in Kansas must be on to something, because eNeighbors will do exactly what all the experts say can’t be done, and we aren’t doing it in San Fran or Philly or DC or Chicago.

First, we’ll build the online network that residents in the community will actually visit and populate with relevant “backyard” content. Next, we’ll build the ad network that will allow those residents to access local business and service provider information. Finally, the entire platform will give way to highly targeted, community-driven citizen journalism, political activism and the ultimate “grail” of all — offline human interaction.

Join us in our vision, and get your neighborhood online today.